Bringing the Bible Out of the Closet

#MyQueerBible and The Hirmeneutics of Creation

Last year for Fr. Shannon Kearn’s Queer Theology synchroblog I wrote about the image of God in Genesis and the potential to reimagine the dominant interpretation of the creation story otherwise (and some material from that has reappeared here in edited form). To queer creation is to reimagine from a perspective that’s not invested in upholding heavily binarized categories: man-woman, human-animal, creator-created, and so on.

There can be no doubt that the narratives of Genesis 1-3 (creation, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve) have been weaponized and used against LGBTQ folk in order to delegitimize their existence, to name them as “unnatural” or “contrary to creation”. Transgender people, for example, are told that God created “man and woman”, and that to “tamper” with one’s “biological sex” is sinful and disordered; and those who are nonheterosexual often hear that clichéd refrain: “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” For many Christians then, Genesis…